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Help - Digital Discourse and How To Guides
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Writing Partners and the Digital Discourse Framework
The Writing Partners platform is designed around The Digital Discourse Framework which involves three practices for humanities classrooms: social exchange, social annotating, and social making. As practices, social exchange, annotating, and making orient us to what people are doing with texts: not as plug-and-play activities but as deeper ways of cultivating and conceptualizing the engagement with texts that we want to foster in the humanities classroom. The word social at the beginning of each one highlights that they are always being practiced with others, whether or not those other people or texts are visible. The question ‘digital discourse for what?’ is at the center to remind us that these digital discourse practices should always be in service of deeper purposes that drive teaching and learning. Building on this framework, educators in the The Digital Discourse Project have created educational and curricular resources for other humanities teachers, and we continue this work on Writing Partners.
Please see a full library of resources in the National Writing Project’s Write Now Teacher’s Studio.
Discuss/Chat Enlarge, Annotate, Learn More |
Read/Annotate Enlarge, Annotate, Learn More |
Create/Edit Enlarge, Annotate, Learn More |
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Overviews of Selected Topics
Click to Chat with the Help Guide
If you want general “how-to” information these resources will prove helpful:
- Writing Partners Overview
- Creating Your Free Account
- My Library (document inbox)
- Profile & Settings (account information)
- Uploading, Collecting, Controlling, and Copying Documents
- A clear step-by-step “recipe” from inquiry question → web article → public SDG group collection
- Sharing Your Documents (“Inviting” others to read and comment on them)
- Publishing Your Document to our Public Youth Voices Collection
- Importing Roster Files into NowComment
- Creating Groups for Document Sharing
- Setting Document Properties and Assignments
- Changing a Document Already Online
- Highlighting Documents in NowComment
- Creating Collections from NowComment Documents
- Accommodating Users Without Email Addresses (“Managed Users”)
- Adding NowComment Document Discussions to other Web Pages (“Embedding”)
- Image Commenting
- Video Commenting
- Analytics and Assessment
- GPT Dialogue Notebook
- Get your AI Assistant here!
- Prompt Guide
- Persona, Purpose, Process, and Product
[last updated: March 2, 2026]
on the uploaded document.